


A Case of You

by SonnetCXVI



Series: I'm a Radio [1]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9426803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SonnetCXVI/pseuds/SonnetCXVI
Summary: Delphine and Cosima, separated.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is loosely based on "A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell. You will better understand the images I have used if you listen to the song but you will not be lost if you don't.
> 
> This is a series of vignettes that are neither chronological nor related, except for the first three Cosima vignettes, which are sequential. You may find that they don't feel canon compliant.
> 
> Thanks to the generous MlleClaudine. The first image in this story belongs to her.
> 
> Thanks especially to Alex, who helps me.

**Delphine**

When Delphine was in medical school she was taught to suture. She had liked the surgical rotation in general, recognizing in the discipline and precision required of the surgical theater her own mental tidiness and desire for order. Her fellows in the rotation also prized surgery; it was the glory field, famed for luring the best and most competitive. But with surgery came suturing and most of them hated it, impatient with what they considered scut work that they would eventually be allowed to delegate to underlings. Delphine liked suturing though, and practiced her subcuticular sutures by repairing the frayed finished edges of the expensive Pratesi sheets her mother had given her as a graduation present when she finished university. She didn’t mind that the 6-0 silk that she had bought to practice with was black or that it stood out on the pristine white edges of her sheets. Its darkness allowed her to gauge the length and spacing of each stitch and was a reminder, as she stood hunched over the table upon which she had laid out her mother’s gift, that she was the only one who valued the piercing, the closing, the necessity of the scar.

**Cosima**

Cosima feels like hot death and decides that getting shitfaced is how she’s going to deal with it. She chooses Mick’s, which is close to the loft, and after much argument about the wisdom of her going on a bender, Felix and Sarah meet her there an hour after she calls. Mick’s is the sort of bar where the barstools smell like ass and everything else smells like toilet and skunky beer, but the drinks are decently cheap and the atmosphere is perfect for feeling like crap both before and after you get hammered. Everything about Mick’s squashes the idea that drinking and puking is going to make you feel better about things and that’s a refreshing honesty after the false cheer and hopefulness served up by everyone around her these past weeks. Cosima’s heart is broken and her health is broken and she’s embracing it tonight like a son-of-a-bitch. The fact that Felix likes Mick’s, which is some sort of string-theory-alternate-universe preference, only makes it better. The bartenders and regulars hammer him with filthy insults which she allows herself to find funny because Felix isn’t bothered at all. Perhaps he recognizes in it a perverse kind of affection that he doesn’t get at the upscale gay bars he also visits, where the staff and patrons don’t find him anything unusual or special. Whatever. Laugh and get fucked-up at Mick’s. That’s the plan.

They sit at a table beneath the TV and decide to do vodka shots. Vodka is less disagreeable if it comes back up, seeing as it has no flavor, and they are committed to a real binge. Cosima suspects that Sarah is nostalgic about playing the bad girl and won’t get through the night without embracing the Zen of Punk and making an ass of herself. The ass-ier the better, Cosima figures. They all need this and who knows if they’ll ever do it again. Just doing it this once might kill her, so _lay on, Macduff_. She plans to join her sister for a full-blown howl at the moon. She’s going to drink Delphine’s memory to death one shitty shot glass at a time. 

**Delphine**

Delphine finally picks up her laundry and there, nestled between her suits and blouses is a lab coat, stiff with the extra sizing that she always orders. She leans in to smell it, the starch and hot-iron smell evoking Cosima’s chiding about the uselessness of starching something that will inevitably be soiled and wilted by the end of the day. She imagines pulling apart the pressed-together sleeves and popping the shoulders so that when she shrugs it on, the coat lies in crisp and professional drapes, her inner self reflected casually in this outward display that is reproduced a hundred times around her in the coats of the other DYAD employees. 

Delphine longs to return to the lab, to sit at a microscope again and retreat to a world where the process isn’t deceitful and she understands the scales and procedures of study, where she is confident and calm moment by moment. How comforting it would be to be small and to slip inside the eyepiece, to compress into a molecule of herself and climb down a twisted strand of Cosima’s DNA, rung by rung, until she finds a place where she can cling and rest and eventually be absorbed. 

When she hangs the coat in her closet she gives it pride of place, and every day when she pulls out her clothing she touches its sleeve, trying to catch on her fingers its scent, which doesn’t linger for more than a second.

**Cosima**

Felix goes to the bar for the first round and the bartender say, “Fuck you, you little butt pirate” when he requests a high-end vodka he knows they won’t have. “Arrrrrr” he responds with a sarcastic wink and snap of his head and returns to the table with six shot glasses of … something. He sighs as he places them on the table. “No potato has been within a continent of this stuff so drink at your own risk.” And then, his face the picture of resignation, “Fuck you, you little butt pirate? This is shaping up to be a plebeian evening.”

They pull the glasses to themselves and each raises one for a toast. “To balls,” offers Sarah. “To hairless balls,” follows Felix. “To ball-less balls,” finishes Cosima and they all laugh, slamming back their glasses and shivering, coughing, or otherwise indicating that the first shot was like drinking propane. The second shot follows soon after, at which point Cosima digs around in her purse for a piece of paper and pulls out an old coaster from someplace called McGee’s. It has a map of Canada on the front, along with a red star that apparently denotes McGee’s location, which if it were to scale would mean that McGee’s is roughly the size of Los Angeles. She flips it over and writes 3.14159265358979323846 in pen on the back. 

“This is the first 20 digits of pi,” she states. “If I get to the point where I can’t recite this, then I need to stop. I’m about 10 seconds from death by alcohol poisoning.”

She throws the coaster and pen onto the table and says she’ll buy the next round, getting up from her chair in a flourish of red skirt and peppery perfume. Sarah and Felix exchange glances and turn their eyes to watch her. She has leaned toward the bartender and is gesturing at their table. When she leans back she reaches into a pocket and tenders her payment, fluttering her hand dismissively when he offers her change. In a moment she is back with six more shot glasses. 

**Delphine**

She hates her desk, her assistant, her windows, her good shoes. She hates that she is as competent and diligent here as she has been in all her other duties and that she must divert her full attention from Leda to the dozen other projects and labs that she now supervises. It pulls at her, this divided attention, like brooding a cowbird egg while her own baby withers and starves. But she needs the nest, or rather, Cosima needs the nest, so she maintains it like a faithful mother, pulling out her feathers to warm it and disgorging pieces of herself to feed its occupants, only one of whom is hers. She flies about to lure away predators, checking Cosima’s lab for new surveillance equipment, tracking the players, maneuvering from her office. She searches far afield to find any bit of research that might help feed the chick. But despite her faithful efforts her little redbird is getting weaker, and no matter how many times Delphine flies home to warm and feed her, she will no longer open her mouth. 

**Cosima**

They have decided to play a drinking game that Felix and Sarah invented as teenagers. After 45 minutes and another four shots Cosima slams down her empty shot glass and announces, “I win!” Sarah and Felix roll their eyes and swallow their concession shots, not even bothering to argue, and from there on out they just talk and drink.

Sarah and Felix aren’t sure if they should bring up the subject of Delphine. On the one hand, this is why they are here; Cosima has been laid low by the whole Delphine affair. On the other hand, they don’t want to get her started on a subject that her inebriation will make worse. They wait for her to choose for herself what she wants to talk about and they stay to topics that are more lighthearted, like Kira’s recent interest in insects.

Eventually, Sarah and Felix retreat to the bathrooms and promise to bring back the next round. Cosima’s already pretty smacked and concentrates on not letting her mind slip away from the bar. She picks up the coaster, flips it over a time or two and then begins tapping its edge on the tabletop, rotating it a quarter turn and tapping it again. She thinks distantly that the only reason she can do this is because she doesn’t try to control the action with her brain, just lets it happen without thought. She indulges in this sort of annoying, repetitive behavior a lot lately, she thinks, and sets the coaster down, just to pick up the pen a moment later and start tapping the empty shot glasses, which are grouped in the middle of the table like a glass harmonica. While Sarah and Felix are at the bar, she picks the coaster back up and flips it over a few more times, finding it harder and harder not to think about Delphine, whose eyes and bare shoulders settle into her thoughts and won’t be dismissed.

Sarah and Felix weave back to the table with only three shot glasses this time, and before setting them on the table ask her to recite pi. They don’t bother to take the coaster from her, knowing that she won’t lie and that they couldn’t concentrate on the numbers well enough to check her response anyway; they’re too drunk to notice that she stops at the fifteenth digit and they set down the final drinks, this unofficial curtailing of their binge the only way they can think to help her. Cosima doesn’t touch her drink but begins to doodle on the coaster while she talks, coloring in the border messily and then starting on the holes in the e’s and a’s of McGee’s Bar and Grill, most of her hand-eye coordination destroyed. Finally, she sketches a little stick man face, just a circle with lines for the eyes and nose and a little curved mouth. She gives it curly hair. Just a single twisty line circling the top of the head, before she realizes her mistake and sets down the pen. 

“I’m sorry, Cosima,” says Sarah for the hundredth time. “I know you miss her.” Cosima’s eyes fill and she begins to cry; Sarah and Felix stand and help her out of the bar, pushing on the door before they realize their mistake and pull instead. When they get outside, they all stand for a moment with their hands stuffed into their pockets, stomping their feet against the cold. Then they link arms and bending at every connection point like a string of pop beads, they head for the loft in a stuttering, lurching approximation of going forward. 

When Cosima wakes the next afternoon feeling nauseated and weak, she sits up shakily. Reaching to get her glasses, she finds a glass of fresh water, leaned against which is the McGee’s coaster. Felix has drawn another face on the map of Canada, and it looks exactly, heartbreakingly, like Delphine.

**Delphine**

Being separated from Cosima is a poisonous fruit. No matter how many layers she peels back and forces herself to swallow, there is always another more wretched mouthful waiting on her plate. Leaving for Frankfurt like a whipped dog, breaking her beloved’s heart in a dirty hallway, putting on the trappings of a DYAD lackey and then being one, doing whatever horrible thing she thinks necessary to protect Cosima: she swallows each with the sure knowledge that some part of her is being permanently soiled. Knowing that she had chosen this course out of love doesn’t change the fact that she feels ashamed, so she washes down each toxic bite with a sip of memory, depending on Cosima’s sweetness to keep her on her feet. 

Being separated from Cosima is a poisonous fruit and at its core is a bitter, poisonous seed. She reaches for it like Eve, knowledge of good and evil no consolation for being cast out of the garden.

**Cosima**

Cosima feels Delphine’s absence like a heart attack, hurt shot through everything like referred pain. Once she would have tried to repair the damage or to at least live with it. Now she is determined to pull everything out altogether. She is going to expel these feelings from what’s left of her life by removing everything else that once occupied her affections. There’s no room for imitation now. Meaningless attachments are sucking out whatever diminished energy she has left to devote to loving something. 

She vows to gather up her books, her notes, and her plants and trash them. Her crumbling _On the Origin of Species_? Gone. Her Vetruvian Man? Gone. Her periodic table? Gone. She looks at her once-life and sees a flattened, moribund nothing, meaningless to her except as a millstone. There is only one thing that will fit into her heart now, and that’s the hole that used to be Delphine. 

**Delphine**

Delphine sits on the edge of her bed, unable to draw up her legs and lie down. She hesitates each night before pulling back the bedding, pausing to caress the memory of her dark lover on the white sheets. These memories are rubbed smooth now from so much caressing, but she says her little rosary anyway: Cosima resting on her breast; Cosima arched beneath her in a wanton’s bow; Cosima offering herself like a cup, to be filled and lost. They had been supplicants here, their mystery unfolding as flesh was joined, exploded, and resurrected on this white and fragrant field. But the bed is only an object now, like a pencil or her keys; she no longer enters it with any reverence. There will be no communion here, no salvation, no transubstantiation of love into flesh. It is only an abandoned altar upon which she lies and prays that Cosima will live. 

She turns to pull down the sheet but tonight she cannot manage it. She gets no farther than the sutured edge and turns back. Perhaps she will dream of Cosima, she thinks; perhaps the dream will be good. Perhaps she won’t dream at all, which will ease the morning. No matter. What is torn apart in her cannot be mended; she will never be whole cloth again. She will always be an unraveled thing, hunched over Cosima’s memory, binding up her edges with precise black stitches made by her own hand.


End file.
